Prominent White Nationalists Fired from National Review

After years defending itself from allegations that it pays academic racists for their writings, the National Review in early April fired two prominent contributors — one for an overtly racist essay published online, a second for speaking in favor of white nationalism at an American Renaissance conference.

The first to go was John Derbyshire, a British-American journalist whose writings on race have ignited fury before. The final straw came in April, when he wrote a piece for Taki’s Magazine, a website published by Greek-born journalist and socialite Taki Theodoracopulos, a self-described anti-Semite. In the essay, Derbyshire suggests that white and Asian parents should warn their children that black people pose a threat to their safety.

“A small cohort of blacks –– in my experience, around five percent –– is ferociously hostile to whites and will go to great lengths to inconvenience or harm us,” Derbyshire wrote. “They will do this out of racial solidarity, the natural willingness of most human beings to be led, and a vague feeling that whites have it coming.”

The National Review responded quickly. On April 7, editor Rich Lowry announced the magazine was parting ways with Derbyshire, saying his essay “lurches from the politically incorrect to the nasty and indefensible. … We never would have published it.”

In an interview with the racist website VDARE.com following his firing, Derbyshire defended his positions, saying that the term “white supremacist” is not a bad term, considering that a society “in which key decisions are made by white Europeans is one of the better arrangements History has come up with.”

A week after Derbyshire’s firing, the magazine let another racist writer go after it came to light that Robert Weissberg, a longtime contributor who once referred to black people as “the stupid black,” had given a speech to an American Renaissance conference discussing the future of white nationalism. American Renaissance is a racist journal whose editor once wrote that black people are incapable of sustaining “any kind of civilization.”

The speech, titled “A Politically Viable Alternative to White Nationalism,” argued that any movement expressly based on white racial identity is “dead on arrival” and must be repackaged in order to win recognition.

Weissberg also noted in his speech that there are still “Whiteopias” in America and endorsed the many ways to keep them white, such as zoning that requires a certain size of home.